CyberLaw Blog

Archive for November 27th, 2008

This is something we addressed recently in Internet: Restricted Access: A Critical Assessment of Internet Content Regulation and Censorship in Turkey.

Turkish Daily News: Banned YouTube still in Top 10

November 26, 2008 Wednesday

Despite being banned, the video-sharing site YouTube remains as one of the most popular Web sites in Turkey, with many, including the prime minister, finding ways to get around the ban

According to the www.alexa.com Web site that categorizes the popularity of over 100 million sites, YouTube is the tenth most visited site in Turkey

Google Turkey, Face Book and Google are the most popular websites.

According to alexa.com, more than a million Internet users in Turkey visit the site

Two courts ordered YouTube banned in response to videos that it deemed insulting to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Under Turkish law, it is a crime to insult Ataturk. However, surfers can still use proxy servers such as vtunnel or ninjacloak to enter blocked sites by hiding their IP address. The irony highlights the legal system’s mistreatment of the medium and lack of technical knowledge

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan surprised everybody when he said last Thursday that he could access YouTube, despite the ban. Erdogan said he watched the ceremony of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, in which headscarf-wearing women became members of the party, on YouTube

When the reporters reminded him of the ban. “I can access (YouTube), you do it, too,” he replied

Just be entering “YouTube’a nasil girilir?” (How to enter Youtube?) or “YouTube’a girmenin yollari” (Ways to enter YouTube) in google or yahoo search engine, up come hundreds of thousands of results, showing just how hard it is to censor the Internet in the information age

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Reports: Orange Customers Blocked From The Pirate Bay: “

The Pirate Bay isn’t new to the experience of being blocked by European ISPs. Now, according to many customers of the ISP Orange, it has been impossible to access the site for the last five days, unless they route their traffic through a proxy. Are Orange really taking the bold step of censoring the world’s largest tracker?

Orange is a very large ISP, serving more than 10 million customers across the UK, France, Spain, Switzerland and several other countries.

No stranger to criticism, in March 2007 UK consumer protection TV show ‘Watchdog’ held a survey which deemed Orange to be the worst ISP in the UK, with the most unreliable broadband service. The survey revealed that the company also had the greatest number of dissatisfied customers and, if recent reports prove correct, Orange are about to start accumulating a few more.

Last Friday, reports started coming in from UK Orange Broadband users, all of them complaining that they can no longer access The Pirate Bay. Initially it seemed that the difficulties could be related to technical issues but as the days have passed, the situation hasn’t changed. Worryingly, the situation is mirrored by Orange customers in France who are also complaining the ‘bay is off-limits.

Some Orange customers with this problem remembered that when The Pirate Bay was blocked in Italy, a new domain was setup (labaia.org) to sidestep the restrictions, but unfortunately this domain is inaccessible to them too. However, many are finding that if they use a proxy site, such as BlockedSiteAccess.com or Megaproxy, The Pirate Bay reappears.

Customers have been complaining to Orange themselves, who haven’t given any indication of how to successfully solve the problem, while neither confirming nor denying claims of a block. Yesterday, TorrentFreak contacted Orange’s PR company for comment and, after a reminder today, received this response:

Our understanding is that Orange doesn’t block access to any sites other than those identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, that relate to illegal child abuse imagery. However, we’re looking into this and will update you again as soon as we can.

Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that they are aware of the problem and are looking into it.

We will update this post as soon as Orange respond definitively, but in the meantime, if you are an Orange customer we would like to hear of your experiences in the comment section.

Update 26/11/08: It’s now 48 hours since we first asked Orange about this problem (and 6 days since it started receiving complaints direct from its subscribers) and we have heard nothing from them, other than the quote above. Sorry folks, but whatever the reason for the problem (block/DNS/other technical issue) it seems Orange doesn’t want to respond to customer complaints.

ICO to get powers to audit public bodies without consent: “The Information Commissioner will be able to perform spot-checks on government departments and public sector bodies to make sure they are complying with the Data Protection Act under new plans announced by the Government yesterday.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)